Must've been a slow day at the G-8 Summit. The Washington Post reports, on A1, that "Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time" at Thomas Jefferson High School (colloquially known as T.J.) in Fairfax County, Virginia. Some fret that the highly selective school, which garnered the top spot in U.S. News & World Report's 2007 high school rankings, suffers from insufficient diversity--a mere 2 percent of this year's T.J. class is African American or Hispanic. In 2004, the Fairfax County School Board put in place a T.J. admissions policy that took race into account as a "plus factor" but not a determining factor (whatever that means), and yet the number of Asian students accepted continues to rise and the number of Hispanic and black students remains low. Here's a thought: Who cares? T.J. is an academically selective school, and its enrollment reveals what NAEP scores and SAT and ACT data have long shown. Asian American and white students tend to do better academically than black and Hispanic students, for a number of varied and complicated reasons. We won't create a brighter American future by hurting high achievers and socially engineering their schools. The job of Fairfax school officials, and those in the other T.J. feeder systems is to educate their black and Hispanic pupils so well in grades K-8 that they're truly competitive when it comes to T.J. admissions.
"At Magnet School, An Asian Plurality," by Michael Alison Chandler, Washington Post, July 7, 2008